Price matching is a classic price fixing mechanism. It is often done by stores like Best Buy. They make some ad like "Get a Blah Blah Blah for only $999, and if you find it cheaper anywhere, we'll match the price!" That tells all your compettitors what you are chargin and lets them know that there is no point in charging less because you will just match. As a reslt, everyone charges The Same High Price.
As many others have pointed out, there are decent tools out there for generating SQL for you. I've used Hibernate quite a bit. It has saved from writing a ton of SQL, but I've still written a lot of HQL (Hibernate Query Language.) Hibernate also has a Criteria class for completely eschewing a query language in favor of purely programmatic queries. It is very limited though.
All that being said, the problem with Hibernate and any other SQL generator is very simple. They are not themselves querying and accessing data. They are specifying an intermediate language that is then in turn parsed and executed. If writing SQL is liking speaking to a translator, then using Hibernate is like speaking to a translator who then speaks to another translator, etc. What the Tutorial D guys are after is a native language that makes the translation(s) as transparent as possible.
I wouldn't call you crazy, but definitely naive. Welcome to the world of big, legacy systems. Comments like "change your business process" will get you nothing but a pink slip (or worse, a job in QA.) Go read any large company's financial statements sometime. There's a good chance that one of these monster join/unions was used at some point in generating the report that was used for the statement. Chances are also that it was auto-generated by some very expensive ERP software. Now go learn about these things and stop acting like know anything about "business processes."
But that's really the reason it's not done all that often.
That is just not true, at least in my experience. Proper unit testing is a significant up-front tax on development time. It's time that you have to account for at the beginning of any project and that makes it very unsavory. It looks bad on a project plan, either as seperate items or as huge amounts of time for coding even the simplest of things. That's why it gets cut. Most engineers that I've worked with would much rather be allotted more time for development with unit testing than less time for development without. Most write unit tests, even when not allotted time for it. They usually can't get the kind of coverage one would want and they tests are not included in any kind of organized suite. I have worked places where testing was mandatory, and the dev times were significantly longer. It's the classic software engineering equation : Quality is proportional to Time multiplied by Money. With Money decreasing (see recession, offshoring) and constant pressure on Time to decrease, of course Quality decreases as well. "Tools" can change the equation some by increasing the constant of proportionality, which is basically one of the "insights" of Cox...
The whole point was not "how does Java solve this super tough problem". The point was that it's not a hard problem and that anybody who knew anything about how garbage collection works would not make such a comment. Of course Slashdot is all about not knowing anything about a subject but making claims about it anyways. Mark and sweep is not the actual algorithm used by JVMs, it is just a simple algorithm that any programmer (and I use that term loosely) should know about from a data structures course. There are actually numerous gc algorithms used by JVMs, in fact you can specify different types of algorithms for the JVM to use based on the type of application and the type of hardware running the application. But do yourself a favor and try to learn the basics first.
How does such ignorance get modded up? You don't have to understand the many intricacies of the jvm's gc algorithm to understand why this is nonsense:
would what happen if two objects referenced each other but nothing else referenced them. Would gc know to follow the links between the two and see that nothing in the main app is using them?
Simple mark and sweep starting at the thread level handles this and any wacky variants of this ( a refs b refs c refs a, etc.) Please try to have SOME clue about what you are talking about before you post...
I think you might have a point. Such a tactic would be a classic monopolist tactic. Charge different prices to different people based on their demand level (money willing to spend.) That way you maximize your fleecing of the public.
This is how IBM made so much money in the 50's. They made very little profits on their mainframes, because the shelf life of the mainframes was so long. So they made all their money on punch cards. If you used somebody else's punchcard, you voided your warranty. They would charge different companies different prices for punchcards, based on how much money the company was worth. A company worth more got charged more.
That's probably true. Some tasks maybe only need level 3, but the marketing droids have convinced the public that they really need level 7 "at minimum"; better go for a level 9 to be safe, or a level 11 for "future proofing".
Actually, no they haven't, and that's a big problem the industry is focussing on. Most people bought computers around 2000, but a lot haven't since. That's why you see all these heavy handed tactics (especially by Microsoft who makes much of their money off people buying new computers) trying to convince people to upgrade. MS won't patch your IE unless you're on XP. Now they want you to buy a new computer so you can play games. If everybody upgraded every couple of years, then they wouldn't bother with such tactics.
In general the review is worthless because the author simply makes sweeping claims without backing them up. He would be a lot more convincing if he stated why such and such service/port/setting should be disabled/closed. And the very fact that he points how thing should be disabled for most home users just points out why Microsoft can't disable these features. Personally my home PC has printer sharing setup, so if SP2 turned that off, then that would cause problems. Given that it was turned on originally in XP, how do you determine which PCs to turn it off when SP2 is installing? A much bigger issue is that turning off many of these services would really wreck havoc at companies. Most small businesses don't have an IT staff to personally install the SP2 and configure each machine. So all those small businesses would suddenly have all kinds of problems. The author is a fool who has a shallow understanding but a very big mouth. Windows is very insecure, even with SP2, but his arguments are as weak as MS security.
Actually you sound like you've never read Mises. The Austrian school is very non-scientific. That's part of their argument against any kind of economic policy (other than pure laissez faire), that any mathematical equations and what not to explain/forecast economies cannot work. They like to refer to how economies are natural forces that cannot be understood. Rigorous mathematical analysis in economics usually springs from more Keynesian approaches. Mises would laugh at such approaches and call you a "planner".
Buying puts against your own company is far from the only way to hedge your investment. In fact, it is hardly even the best way to do it. I'm guessing your company was a high-tech company, so invest in companies that are negatively correlated to technology. Johnson & Johnson is a good example. Or invest in gold or especially bonds. Or if you are determined to buy puts, buy puts on companies that are positively correlated to your company. Again if your company was a high-tech company, then buy puts against other high-tech companies or against an index fund that concentrates on tech (or even just a Nasdaq index fund.)
There are so many ways to hedge yourself in the stock market. There is no excuse for people to not hedge themselves. Whenever I hear one of these horror stories about "I exercised my stock options (i.e., granted stock) at $X then six months later it was worth $0, but I still had to pay taxes on $X! Oh boo hoo!" it annoys me at how people refuse to take responsibility for their decision. The reason why people exercise and wait on options is to avoid taxes. By waiting six months after exercising options, you only have to pay long term capital gains tax (20%.) Don't claim it's because you were "mislead" to believe the company's stock was going to go up. If that was the case, then you could wait to exercise your options. No, you choose to take a risk in order to avoid paying full taxes. It's a big risk to take, and it is pure greed. If the stock tanks and you are left in heavy debt to the IRS, it is your own fault. Not the IRS. Not your company's. Not "Wall Street." Not the federal government. It is your fault.
Well, DirecTV doesn't give away DVRs to new customers
RTFA. It is widely speculated that this is what DirecTV will do when they start selling non-Tivo DirecTV DVRs later this year. This is a move to compete with cable companies who already give away low quality DVRs integrated with their cable boxes...
If DirecTV no longer supports the Tivo, Tivo will lose subscribers.
So do you really think DirecTV might leave their many (500,000+) subscribers with DirecTV Tivo boxes high and dry? It seems pretty obvious that if that happened, then Tivo wouldn't be the only people losing subscribers.
56% of them are from DirecTV, and their deal ends next year (DirecTV isn't signing a new agreement last time I heard). Losing all of them would be a HUGE hit to their revenue stream.
Why would they lose any of their DirecTV customers? That would require purchasing a new DirecTV-DVR (existing customers would not be eligible for any of the discounted dvrs that DirecTV gives away to new subscribers) or switching from DirecTV to some other satellite/cable provider that would give you a free dvr. There's no reason to believe that they will lose subscribers. What is more likely is that their adoption rate will lower as DirecTV brings in a lot of their subscribers currently. So the rate of increase on their number of subscribers could go down, but not the number of subscribers. They're not in AOL mode (yet.)
There are some decent arguments for using Mono over Java on Linux. Those arguments don't hold up as well on OSX, though. Java support on the Mac is in many ways superior to Java on any other platform, especially for Swing apps (the counterpart to most Cocoa# apps.) Still it could be attractice to have a framework that made it as easy as Java is for developing cross-platform (Windows/Linux/OSX) apps that would have significant performance advantages over Java on 2 out of 3 of those platforms.
Of course this sounds ridiculous to everybody, and lots of people are now convinced their business acumen is superior to board of directors of Roxio/Napster... But this could be a good idea IF:
Napster can cement itself as the #2 online music store
Napster can use all that new capital to build innovative, cheap MP3 players. Maybe a 10 GB player for $150?
Napster can ride Microsoft's coattails and their super cheap player to surpass Apple
CD burning software fades away as a commodity. Most burning is done by media player programs, like the Napster/Windows Media Player. Data/image burning is handled by Windows.
If all/most of these things happen, then Napster will look pretty strong. I actually think that #1 is likely to happen because of their college ploy. I think #4 also has a good chance, too.
It's huge in the Bay Area. It's really big for tech jobs. I've found my last three jobs through craigslist. I sold a Tivo unit through there. I bought a hard drive on craigslist.
As many others have pointed out, this SP2 for Win XP (which is what, version "5.1" of the NT code), so it is hardly "the first time"...
I congratulate them for doing the Right Thing and making sure they deliver a rock solid Service Pack for the millions of XP users out there.
Please. Rock solid? Has there ever been a release of Windows that can be described as such? What is SP2 about after all? They have so many bugs with XP that instead of trying to patch them all, they are releasing a service pack that makes it more difficult to access these exploits/bugs. If XP was rock solid, then there wouldn't be so many virii, worms, etc. It's also the bugginess of XP that is making SP2 so challenging. It's those challenges that have caused so many delays in its release, and yes that is amusing. It's amusing to see an arrogant company like Microsoft have problems that they have brought on themselves by producing such low quality software.
Before the slashdot editors and crowd crow over this delay, just remember the 503 errors and flakiness this site has experienced since "maintenance" was performed. Don't throw stones in glass houses, kids.
You're making a classic
ad homenim fallacy. The availability of Slashdot's servers has nothing to do with people being amused at Microsoft's problems. I also find it hypocritical for you to talk about "the slashdot editors and crowd" when it easy to look at your history and see how into the site you are personally. You're part of the crowd buddy, like it or not.
And finally let me say that such a MS-fanboy post is not surprising from a staunch Republican supporter. Monoculture is often used to describe the Microsoft desktop monopoly, but it could be equally applied to the philosophies of the Republican party.
Re:PE (Price/Earnings ratio) is the number to look
on
Google Sets IPO Pricing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The low end of their IPO price ($108) would have their PE at :
$36.25B * 108/135 * 1/(4*79.1M) = 91.6
Still pretty high. Comparing to banking stocks is silly though, since Google is not a bank. Comparing to other internet stocks is more informative. Yahoo trades at a PE of 110. Ebay trades at a PE of 78. Amazon trades at a PE of 60.
Google's price-to-sales ratio (@ $108/share) would be 10.35. This is lower than Yahoo's 14.35, eBay's 18.20, though much lower than Amazon's 2.71.
Google will be an expensive stock, but certainly in-line with other internet stocks.
Forget about math being a sport or not, imagine if mathematical prowess was as highly regarded in the US as running or jumping. Just imagine high schools where every student looked forward to and studied for the AHSME every year. Imagine colleges where all the talk on campus was on who made the first team for this year's Putnam. Just imagine such a world for a moment. Nobody degrades their fellow student for being smart, but instead admires them. Imagine the kind of movies and tv shows that would be popular in such a world. Imagine the kind of political leaders it would have. Imagine the amazing advances that would be made in a country where 200 million people knew calculus. Just imagine... Alright go back to your porn...
Slashdot Mirror
but I call it Nice N' Nippley.
Price matching is a classic price fixing mechanism. It is often done by stores like Best Buy. They make some ad like "Get a Blah Blah Blah for only $999, and if you find it cheaper anywhere, we'll match the price!" That tells all your compettitors what you are chargin and lets them know that there is no point in charging less because you will just match. As a reslt, everyone charges The Same High Price.
As many others have pointed out, there are decent tools out there for generating SQL for you. I've used Hibernate quite a bit. It has saved from writing a ton of SQL, but I've still written a lot of HQL (Hibernate Query Language.) Hibernate also has a Criteria class for completely eschewing a query language in favor of purely programmatic queries. It is very limited though.
All that being said, the problem with Hibernate and any other SQL generator is very simple. They are not themselves querying and accessing data. They are specifying an intermediate language that is then in turn parsed and executed. If writing SQL is liking speaking to a translator, then using Hibernate is like speaking to a translator who then speaks to another translator, etc. What the Tutorial D guys are after is a native language that makes the translation(s) as transparent as possible.
I wouldn't call you crazy, but definitely naive. Welcome to the world of big, legacy systems. Comments like "change your business process" will get you nothing but a pink slip (or worse, a job in QA.) Go read any large company's financial statements sometime. There's a good chance that one of these monster join/unions was used at some point in generating the report that was used for the statement. Chances are also that it was auto-generated by some very expensive ERP software. Now go learn about these things and stop acting like know anything about "business processes."
I guess you haven't heard about Friendster ?
There's also this little site that uses PHP for many of its apps...
The whole point was not "how does Java solve this super tough problem". The point was that it's not a hard problem and that anybody who knew anything about how garbage collection works would not make such a comment. Of course Slashdot is all about not knowing anything about a subject but making claims about it anyways. Mark and sweep is not the actual algorithm used by JVMs, it is just a simple algorithm that any programmer (and I use that term loosely) should know about from a data structures course. There are actually numerous gc algorithms used by JVMs, in fact you can specify different types of algorithms for the JVM to use based on the type of application and the type of hardware running the application. But do yourself a favor and try to learn the basics first.
I think you might have a point. Such a tactic would be a classic monopolist tactic. Charge different prices to different people based on their demand level (money willing to spend.) That way you maximize your fleecing of the public.
This is how IBM made so much money in the 50's. They made very little profits on their mainframes, because the shelf life of the mainframes was so long. So they made all their money on punch cards. If you used somebody else's punchcard, you voided your warranty. They would charge different companies different prices for punchcards, based on how much money the company was worth. A company worth more got charged more.
This guy is just ripping off a Pink Floyd classic
In general the review is worthless because the author simply makes sweeping claims without backing them up. He would be a lot more convincing if he stated why such and such service/port/setting should be disabled/closed. And the very fact that he points how thing should be disabled for most home users just points out why Microsoft can't disable these features. Personally my home PC has printer sharing setup, so if SP2 turned that off, then that would cause problems. Given that it was turned on originally in XP, how do you determine which PCs to turn it off when SP2 is installing? A much bigger issue is that turning off many of these services would really wreck havoc at companies. Most small businesses don't have an IT staff to personally install the SP2 and configure each machine. So all those small businesses would suddenly have all kinds of problems. The author is a fool who has a shallow understanding but a very big mouth. Windows is very insecure, even with SP2, but his arguments are as weak as MS security.
Actually you sound like you've never read Mises. The Austrian school is very non-scientific. That's part of their argument against any kind of economic policy (other than pure laissez faire), that any mathematical equations and what not to explain/forecast economies cannot work. They like to refer to how economies are natural forces that cannot be understood. Rigorous mathematical analysis in economics usually springs from more Keynesian approaches. Mises would laugh at such approaches and call you a "planner".
Buying puts against your own company is far from the only way to hedge your investment. In fact, it is hardly even the best way to do it. I'm guessing your company was a high-tech company, so invest in companies that are negatively correlated to technology. Johnson & Johnson is a good example. Or invest in gold or especially bonds. Or if you are determined to buy puts, buy puts on companies that are positively correlated to your company. Again if your company was a high-tech company, then buy puts against other high-tech companies or against an index fund that concentrates on tech (or even just a Nasdaq index fund.)
There are so many ways to hedge yourself in the stock market. There is no excuse for people to not hedge themselves. Whenever I hear one of these horror stories about "I exercised my stock options (i.e., granted stock) at $X then six months later it was worth $0, but I still had to pay taxes on $X! Oh boo hoo!" it annoys me at how people refuse to take responsibility for their decision. The reason why people exercise and wait on options is to avoid taxes. By waiting six months after exercising options, you only have to pay long term capital gains tax (20%.) Don't claim it's because you were "mislead" to believe the company's stock was going to go up. If that was the case, then you could wait to exercise your options. No, you choose to take a risk in order to avoid paying full taxes. It's a big risk to take, and it is pure greed. If the stock tanks and you are left in heavy debt to the IRS, it is your own fault. Not the IRS. Not your company's. Not "Wall Street." Not the federal government. It is your fault.
Holy Dutch Auctions Batman!
There are some decent arguments for using Mono over Java on Linux. Those arguments don't hold up as well on OSX, though. Java support on the Mac is in many ways superior to Java on any other platform, especially for Swing apps (the counterpart to most Cocoa# apps.) Still it could be attractice to have a framework that made it as easy as Java is for developing cross-platform (Windows/Linux/OSX) apps that would have significant performance advantages over Java on 2 out of 3 of those platforms.
- Napster can cement itself as the #2 online music store
- Napster can use all that new capital to build innovative, cheap MP3 players. Maybe a 10 GB player for $150?
- Napster can ride Microsoft's coattails and their super cheap player to surpass Apple
- CD burning software fades away as a commodity. Most burning is done by media player programs, like the Napster/Windows Media Player. Data/image burning is handled by Windows.
If all/most of these things happen, then Napster will look pretty strong. I actually think that #1 is likely to happen because of their college ploy. I think #4 also has a good chance, too.It's huge in the Bay Area. It's really big for tech jobs. I've found my last three jobs through craigslist. I sold a Tivo unit through there. I bought a hard drive on craigslist.
And finally let me say that such a MS-fanboy post is not surprising from a staunch Republican supporter. Monoculture is often used to describe the Microsoft desktop monopoly, but it could be equally applied to the philosophies of the Republican party.
Still pretty high. Comparing to banking stocks is silly though, since Google is not a bank. Comparing to other internet stocks is more informative. Yahoo trades at a PE of 110. Ebay trades at a PE of 78. Amazon trades at a PE of 60.
Google's price-to-sales ratio (@ $108/share) would be 10.35. This is lower than Yahoo's 14.35, eBay's 18.20, though much lower than Amazon's 2.71.
Google will be an expensive stock, but certainly in-line with other internet stocks.
I call bullshit. Let's see your wife's breasts so we can all judge for ourselves.
Forget about math being a sport or not, imagine if mathematical prowess was as highly regarded in the US as running or jumping. Just imagine high schools where every student looked forward to and studied for the AHSME every year. Imagine colleges where all the talk on campus was on who made the first team for this year's Putnam. Just imagine such a world for a moment. Nobody degrades their fellow student for being smart, but instead admires them. Imagine the kind of movies and tv shows that would be popular in such a world. Imagine the kind of political leaders it would have. Imagine the amazing advances that would be made in a country where 200 million people knew calculus. Just imagine... Alright go back to your porn...